‘Moving on’ from national horror: A German solution

Many Indians drive German cars; fans of each brand will quote — with their eyes closed — long tracts from owner’s manualsduring biblical battles on the question of wiper velocity.

Many more Indians will talk of the conquests of Bayern Munich (a German football club) with the panting usually reserved for the memory of that first kiss.

Countless Indians have used a popular aftershave that is promoted with images of a semi-naked surfing boy and a fully liveried classical composition, “Carmina Burana”. Slightly fewer than countless Indians have Googled to learn that the composition is by Carl Orff (a German composer).

Yet, when one tells a fellow Indian that one is visiting Germany, the usual response is as basic as that of a toddler brightly saying bow-wow on spotting a dog: “Oh, Hitler’s country.” And the World War II ended almost 70 years ago, long before the current lot of Indians that drives German cars was born.

Germany, though, has moved on.

In India, “move on” is the chant of investment sharks and developmentalists. They discharge their incantations at anyone begging for a cure for traumas caused by prejudice, hate, or indifference. And India is only 66 years old.

Indeed, “move on” is the mantra which, some socioeconomic pundits believe, will exorcise India of its ghosts — such as the displaced, the riot-hit, and the caste-war casualties. But as Germany has shown, moving on is not as easy as treating a victim of a moral cataclysm to developmental ice lollies like smooth roads — even if German cars can reach 200 kilometres per hour on them.

The example of Germany’s transformation is ordinary, and therefore is evident everywhere. The bartender at a Hanover hotel is a German-Asian. His Filipina mother had settled in the city and married a German. A store assistant in a kitchen-utilities store at the Ernst August Galerie, a central Hanover mall, is Chinese. She says she immigrated four years ago. She speaks fluent German. So today’s Germany is not the exclusive Aryan camp that Hitler had wanted to create. And the world knows that Hitler’s mode of ensuring exclusion was extermination.

And Germans know that the world knows — when they mention Hitler, they realize they do not need to add Wikipedia-like clarifications. They don’t say, “Adolf Hitler…you know…the dictator who led the Nazis.” The guide in Nuremberg — where Nazis were tried after the World War II — spoke of the “horrible plan” of simply “Hitler”, while referring to Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass).

In November 1938, Hitler’s forces and civilians rampaged through the streets of Germany and Austria, attacking Jews and demolishing their properties. Shards of broken glass shone on the streets like crystals, hence the name.

Acknowledgement of the past is not a mere fashionable political accessory to Germans’ conversations. They discuss and reflect — with intellectual valor and civility. In 1996, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Daniel Goldhagen, an American academic, argued that Nazis and Germans had been rendered interchangeable because of a long tradition of anti-Semitism.

Instead of death threats, Goldhagen received speaking engagements in Germany. Israeli historian Amos Elon has calculated that over a period of four months, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” sold five times as many copies as “Mein Kampf” managed to do in the four years since its publication in 1925. In fact, Goldhagen was given the Democracy Prize, a prominent German honour.

In 1960, there appeared one of the earliest indications that a majority of ordinary Germans wanted to comprehend the horrors their country had wreaked on world history. In his masterwork “Postwar”, historian Tony Judt has notedthat “The Diary of Annie Frank” sold 700,000 copies that year in West Germany. The diary is the journal of a young girl whose family went into hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

With eloquence and logic, Judt shows how the German mind evolved to reach that point. He says that no German notable had mentioned Nazi depravity through the 1940s and 1950s. And as far from the war as 1952, two out of five West Germans told a survey that it was ‘better’ to have no Jews, Judt says.

“The change in mood was driven in large measure by a wave of anti-Semitic vandalism at the end of the Fifties and by growing evidence that young Germans were utterly ignorant about the Third Reich,” Judt writes. “Their parents had told them nothing and the teachers avoided the subject.”

Now, history books for schoolchildren reflect the meditation on the national soul. “All Nazi imagery and icons are banned, of course,” said a front-office manager of a Hanover hotel. He said sensitivity was exercised elsewhere too. “For example, a term for black people — though only a colloquial expression and not an insulting one — has been removed from school books so that children do not learn it,” he said.

A board near the leopards’ enclosure at Hanover zoo displays charming spelling errors

In India, history for kids is often the narrative of the political party in power. But in Germany, important cultural narratives have sought to suppress political power.

When Berlin was being revamped after it became the reunified Germany’s capital in 1990, only those architectural plans that envisaged an east-west array for government buildings were put on a shortlist. The government wanted to distance itself, literally in this case, from the north-south line mooted for the Nazi capital by Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect.

In his book, “Capital Dilemma — Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy”, Michael Wise says the parliament building in the West German capital, Bonn, “constantly reminds politicians…that not they, but the voters, are sovereign. Staircases are set off-angle to mute their grandeur and, lest politicians be tempted to undemocratic heights, the steps lead down rather than up to the modestly appointed chamber.”

The German government’s desire to move on was matching the steps of the public. After the release of Anne Frank’s book, came the epic turning point. As Judt observes, ‘Holocaust’, an American miniseries, was telecast in 1979 in West Germany, drawing 20 million viewers, “well over half the adult population.”

The figure testifies to the long journey the country had made away from the war era. The narrator of “Dr Faustus”, a novel by German writer Thomas Mann — who fled Germany when it became Hitlerland — rues that his country has become a “nation that cannot show its face”. The novel was published in 1947, two years after the World War II ended.

Today, Germany’s face can launch a thousand “movings on”, to paraphrase a line from an earlier version of “Dr Faustus”, by Christopher Marlowe.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Kannan Somasundaram is a senior assistant editor at the Times of India in Ahmedabad. After graduating from New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia in 1994, he began his career in journalism as a film and book reviewer. The amorality and violence of modern cinema and literature prepared him well for subsequent stints with news desks dealing with Indian politics.

Kannan Somasundaram is a senior assistant editor at the Times of India in Ahmedabad. After graduating from New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia in 1994, he be. . .

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Kannan Somasundaram is a senior assistant editor at the Times of India in Ahmedabad. After graduating from New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia in 1994, he began his career in journalism as a film and book reviewer. The amorality and violence of modern cinema and literature prepared him well for subsequent stints with news desks dealing with Indian politics.

Kannan Somasundaram is a senior assistant editor at the Times of India in Ahmedabad. After graduating from New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia in 1994, he be. . .